Long and Short

I’ve written less than a dozen short stories over the past seven or eight years. Most of my writing comes out as either poetry, journal entries, or fragmentary novels. It isn’t that I’m necessarily biased against short fiction; it’s more that whenever I begin to become attached to my fictional characters I immediately want to expand on them, to reach beyond the simple confines of an eight-page tale, to branch into their past and their future. Most of what I read are novels, as opposed to short fiction, so naturally I’m going to gravitate toward writing novels.

Operating on that theory, I borrowed three books of short stories from the library. I might become more geared to writing stories if I read more stories. It’s a literary genre I do admire and respect, the short story. It’s both intimidating and alluring. Strange that I’d be more frightened of a 2000-word piece than a 50,000-word one. But in novel-writing you have the luxury of dragging, sprawling your ideas, concepts, characters, storylines over the course of a few hundred pages. Whereas, with the short story, every single word counts. You don’t get to linger; you have to sprint into that darkened room, grab what you need, and rush back out again.

My best short story feels to me like a novel in miniature. It’s just a series of tiny scenes profiling different characters, and every word of it feels right.

I have a few other pieces that I’m proud of, to varying degrees. Certain ones still need work. Some I never want to see again. And there are ideas floating around in my brain, ideas for novels that could be given a trial run as short stories somewhere along the way. Then, if I never got around to doing the whole book, at least I’d have the story.

Today at work I scribbled down a note: “Shouldn’t put all your literary eggs in one basket.” Meaning, working straight through on one project for a year or so, without taking time out to play in other sandboxes once in a while, is probably detrimental to an intuitive writer. Maybe not a writer who thinks more in analytical, scientific terms-but I am not that writer. I write from the point of view of emotion far more effectively than from the point of view of logic. That’s why, for my Senior Seminar project in college, I chose to do a creative-writing project rather than a formal paper of some sort. My heart knows more truth than my mind does.

New methods for writing stories:

Write down random words and potential titles in a notebook. Leave them alone for a while. Come back to them a few days later. Choose one and write a spontaneous story about it. (This method worked with staggering success for Ray Bradbury.)

Along those same lines, write down a few opening sentences. Try to come up with openers that make you wonder what happens next. Example: Gus knew he was in trouble when the Vice-President pissed on him and called him a greasy pimp. See, that’s a story I would love to read.